Finding Henri Nouwen in The Sound of Metal

The last book my dad loaned me was Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out. It’s a strange little book from 1975, all about loneliness. His copy is full of notes, shaky underlines, and emphatic arrows. Twenty years ago, when he first got sick, I read those marked-up passages so often I nearly memorized them.

I hadn’t thought about Reaching Out in years, but Darius Marder’s most recent film, The Sound of Metal, sent me digging for my copy. 

This intense, harrowing film follows Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed), a drummer facing unexpected hearing loss. Theatrically released in 2019, it gained a wider audience when later available to stream on Amazon Prime and it became part of the Criterion Collection in 2022.

The Sound of Metal is a study of Ruben’s confrontation with loneliness. When it opens, Ruben is on tour with his girlfriend, Lou. He has been sober for four years, and his sobriety hinges on his ability to lose himself in his drumming. His sudden hearing loss sends him spiraling and reveals a deeper powerlessness.

In Reaching Out, Nouwen writes: “Could it be that we cannot accept our powerlessness and are only willing to see those wounds that we can heal? Could it be that we do not want to give up the illusion that we are masters over our world?”

As Lou watches Ruben sink into despair, she quickly finds a bed for him at a sober living house for the deaf. This will keep him safe, but they can no longer stay together.

As they part, Ruben breaks down, clinging to Lou and screaming that she is his “heart.” His fear of loneliness illustrates Nouwen’s observation that, “When we load our fellow human beings with immortal expectations, and separation or the threat of it can release uncontrollable sentiments.” 

At the group home, Ruben faces brutal isolation: he can’t yet sign or read lips. Joe, the leader of the group home, recognizes him trying to stay busy to distract himself. “All I want you to do is just sit,” says Joe. “And if and when you cannot sit. . . I want you to write.” 

Nouwen writes about distraction, too: “As long as our minds, hearts and hands are occupied, we can avoid confronting the painful questions, to which we never gave much attention and which we do not want to surface.” 

Ruben’s first “sitting” session does not go well. He’s so used to filling silence instead of facing it, he creates the only chaos he can – he smashes his donut.

Still, just by showing up, Ruben is at the threshold of healing. Or, as Nouwen says, “receiving the full understanding of the story. . . [that] can be hard to tell, full of disappointments and frustrations, full of deviations and stagnations, but it is the only story the stranger has.”

As the days pass, Ruben embraces his writing time. He confronts his loneliness, and it starts to shift into receptive solitude. He learns to sign, and becomes immersed in his community. He even helps out at a local school, where he bonds with the class troublemaker. 

Ruben begins to live out Nouwen’s writing on communal life: “We can become present to others by reaching out to them, not greedy for attention and affection but offering our own selves to help build a community of love. Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.”

Ruben is thriving, yet longs to return to his old life. Joe offers him a job at the group home, and he panics, packs his bags, and schedules cochlear implant surgery.

When Ruben tells Joe he’s leaving and asks for money, Joe kicks Ruben out of the group home, since he will no longer, technically, be deaf.

Joe also tells Ruben why he had him write those mornings – to help Ruben find, “those moments of stillness, that place. That’s the Kingdom of God.”

These words about stillness don’t register: Ruben storms out in anger, stunned at such abrupt exile from this place that helped him heal.

The surgery helps Ruben’s hearing, but sounds are tinny and distorted. Still, Ruben is convinced he can reunite with Lou and tour again. His earlier codependent relationship with Lou illustrates Nouwen’s observation that: “Without the solitude of the heart, we cannot experience others as different from ourselves, only as people who can be used for the fulfillment of our own, often hidden, needs.”

Receptive solitude has transformed Ruben. He can see Lou clearly: at first mention of their band, Lou scratches at her now-healed self-harm scars. Apart from him, she has healed. 

It’s a quiet, compassionate break-up scene: painful, but also full of clarity and stillness. 

On the street, the day he leaves, he’s bombarded by noise: car horns, sirens, kids shrieking. A church bell starts clanging. We hear what Ruben is hearing, and the noise is torturous.

Overwhelmed, Ruben pulls out his implants, plunging back into stillness. In the calm of the silence, everything holds a special kind of beauty, a tenderness. Two boys play on their skateboards. The sun filters through tree branches.

Nouwen writes, “When we have once sensed what solitude can mean, we will never stop searching for it. Once we have tasted this solitude, a new life becomes possible, in which we can become detached from false ties and attached to God and each other in surprising new ways.”

This moment is beautiful. It doesn’t erase all that Ruben has lost, or the pain he is facing. There will still be great pain. But he also finds new stillness, and the Kingdom of God within that stillness. 

Ruben learns to pause and listen. 

I think of all those notes my dad scribbled in Reaching Out. My dad, who for 20 years has lived with deep, debilitating depression, so severe that he can’t focus on reading.

The notes he left are proof that he once had the capacity to find stillness and solitude within his life. That he might sometimes, even now, pause and find The Kingdom of God within the pain.

And they remind me to keep trying, too.